The "fruit Was Never This Sweet" Myth

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Feb 4, 2015
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Another buzz phrase that is a part of the irrational fear of carbohydrate that is often uttered among noobs is the idea that fruit was "never this sweet" or that we've "bred" it to have more "sugar."

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This is easily disproven.

To taste a watermelon is to know “what the angels eat,” Mark Twain proclaimed.

The fact that you can still find wild fruit tress (no human interaction) with sweet fruits is enough evidence.

Here is a painting of the super sweet Jackfruit in 1656, 360 years ago, long before modern farming practices, by Michał Boym, a Polish explorer who painted it while in China.

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Selective breeding is not the same as genetic modifcaiton. There are many paintings of fruit from hundreds of years ago. And yes, it was sweet. There are plenty of historical accounts from world travelers about the sweetness of fruit.

We can go back even further. Archaeologists found watermelon seeds, along with the remnants of other fruits, at a 5,000-year-old settlement in Libya:

An archaeobotanical contribution to the history of watermelon Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Mats. & Nakai (syn. C. vulgaris Schrad.).

But more obvious evidence is the fact that we are a primate species that evolved in the African tropics where sweet fruit supplied calories for omnivorous apes for millions of years.

The sweet cherry tree, Prunus avium, has been around Europe and Asia for a very long time.

But Ms. Minger already covered this topic, of course.

"Fruit is decidedly sparser once you get out of the tropics, but considering we were stationed in Africa until about 50,000 years ago, the flora of a backyard in Michigan might not be a great reflection of the plant life we encountered for the majority of our evolution. As a result, comparisons of cold-climate fruits to their wild ancestors (for instance, a Red Delicious versus a crab apple) tend to be misleading, and tropical fruits may offer more insight. Although we’ll probably never get a clear picture of the exact fruits available to early humans, we can look at the wild fruits growing today to get an idea of what nature is capable of producing on its own.

Although not all wild fruits are as big and sweet as our modern cultivars, at least some are, and certain varieties even surpass our deliberately-bred fruits in size and flavor. Nature—especially with selection pressure from other fruit-eating creatures—is perfectly capable of producing sweet (and sometimes massive) fruits without human intervention. It seems unlikely that early humans only ever encountered berries or other “small, bitter” fruits, and avoiding sweeter fruits on the basis of evolutionary history may be misguided.

Based on the limited research we have, wild fruits aren’t considerably different from cultivated fruit in terms of carbohydrate content, fructose content, or fiber content. Both wild and cultivated fruit seem to average around 90% of calories from carbohydrates, and have a sugar composition that yields roughly equal parts glucose and fructose. And both wild and cultivated fruit can be relatively high or low in fiber.

Although berries are often lauded as being lower in fructose compared to other fruits, from a calorie/energy standpoint, this just ain’t true!

Early humans may very well have had access to fruit for most or even all of the year. The fruiting seasons we witness in cooler climates—with most fruit appearing in the summer—doesn’t necessarily apply to our evolutionary homeland closer to the equator.

I blame the “wild fruit is bitter and small” belief on our woeful state of food education. Most people can name more types of candy than they can of fruit, even though there are literally thousands of edible varieties across the globe—a great many of them wild. With the exception of raw foodists, well-traveled gourmands, and anyone who hangs out at Asian markets, most people’s concept of “fruit” is limited to the standard grocery store staples, with little idea of what else is out there."

Wild and Ancient Fruit: Is it Really Small, Bitter, and Low in Sugar?
 

DaveFoster

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Rather, we eat sweetened varieties of bitter fruits, such as apples.

Good post; I believe jackfruit has a limiting factor in its consumption (some alkaloid if I recall.)
 

lvysaur

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"Fruit is decidedly sparser once you get out of the tropics, but considering we were stationed in Africa until about 50,000 years ago, the flora of a backyard in Michigan might not be a great reflection of the plant life we encountered for the majority of our evolution.
This is my thinking as well. The Inuit have a 10% sugar intolerance rate (probably 15-20% if pure Inuit), while living in the Arctic. So humans are so sugar-adapted that even the majority of Arctic people can digest it.

There might be some fine tuning type genetic realities meaning that northern people should eat LESS sugar than southerners, but all evidence is against the "zero sugar" diet that people promote.

For a similar reason, I believe that everyone is well-adapted to eat some meat.
 

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